Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Sun demands an IDE user recount …

From a vendor PoV for tracking and measuring yourself, Sun putting code in NetBeans to ‘phone home’ is a bit … wait isn’t NetBeans “open source”? How did that code get in there?
Using this technique to legitimize your open source project… that I’m not so comfortable with (so far). Open source projects tend to care about their users first and when they have a strong community, everyone tends to know it instinctively. 787 Eclipse plug-ins is huge and everyone knows there are many Eclipse users – without a ‘phone’ dialing home.
Should every project out there ‘phone home’? I use Eclipse, but honestly these days it’s maybe a few times a month – should Eclipse try this, I’d be counted as an active user. But that doesn’t show how much time I spend using Eclipse – so should the ‘Eclipse phone’ then start tracking the hours spent using Eclipse phoning home every minute? Should Apache start having every httpd server ‘phone home’ every day? Gnome? KDE? GnuCash? At what point does every app on your system start ‘phoning home’ just so some vendor can count you as a user?

I’m just raising more questions than answering and I know that, but I’m curious who in the NetBeans ‘open source’ developer community decided to propose this… I see there are 19 listed NetBeans “developers” but it’s unclear if they all work for Sun or someone else truly in the ‘open community’. I suspect NetBeans is exhibiting signs of vendor dominance and ‘phoning home’ is just an extension of that problem. Vendor independence explains why BEA, IBM, Zend, Borland, SAP and other competitors can come together on a common platform: Eclipse – and no one needs to ‘phone home’ to know this is working.

Imagine every Eclipse RCP app phoning home – every Notes 8, Sametime 7.5 user…